The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, today urged members of the public to be "demanding" of their liberty by complaining of every instance of unnecessary law and excessive red tape on a new government website.

In what is being described as "a call to arms against pointless regulation" the Your Freedom website will collate public suggestion for abolishing pointless rules, excessive regulations and infringements on liberty.

He added: "Every time you have had to fill out three versions of the same form, tell us about it. Every time you have felt snooped on by the state, tell us about it. Every unnecessary law, every mind-numbing rule, every time your rights have been infringed – now is the time to tell us about it."

Clegg launched the initiative in east London, today, where he said: "What I find especially exciting about this project is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of government's control. Real democracy is unspun – it is the raucous, unscripted debates that always throw up the best ideas."

The Your Freedom project asks citizens three questions:

• Which current laws would you like to remove or change because they restrict your civil liberties?

• Which regulations do you think should be removed or changed to make running your business or organisation as simple as possible?

• Which offences do you think we should remove or change and why?

Clegg cautioned that the government would not be able to respond to every suggestion, but he promised that every comment would at least be read.

"For the first time, government is listening and will put the best suggestions into practice," he promised.

He said ideas submitted in the online consultation process would be taken into account in the drafting of a Freedom Bill to be published this autumn, with the aim of rolling back unnecessary regulation.

Clegg told BBC Breakfast: "We are turning things on its head. The traditional way of doing things is that government tells people what to do.

"That is the old way of doing things. We are saying 'tell us what you don't want us to do'."

Clegg said letting dormant laws accumulate on the statute book sends out the "wrong signal" and there is plenty of "old stuff" that should be dropped.

He said the Labour government had gone too far in invading people's privacy. "Did that make us safer? No, it didn't necessarily make us safer, so we've got to get the balance right," he said.

He added that from today, any minister who proposes a new regulation will also have to propose an existing law to be taken off the statute book. "It's a one in, one out rule."